ed to be proper that I should render the disappointment of as little moment as possible, by the manner of announcing it, without, however, putting anything to hazard by an indiscreet manifestation of unnecessary solicitude.

The little which I supposed it requisite to say on this occasion appeared to be very well received; and, if any disagreeable impression was left on the mind of Mr. Canning, it certainly was not visible. A feeling of regret was perhaps perceptible, and a hope was intimated that the time was not far distant, when I should be enabled to do what at present was out of my power; but nothing occurred which could be construed into a symptom of impatience, jealousy, or dissatisfaction. There was, undoubtedly, no real ground for anything of the sort; but it was, notwithstanding, quite possible that the importance, which it had become a habit to attach to the arrival of the Osage, from circumstances principally accidental, might have produced a disposition to think otherwise.

I thought it advisable to make use of this opportunity (although the topic was, in many views, more delicate than it had been) to suggest the propriety of yielding, as the moment was sufficiently favorable to such a course, upon the subject of the late Orders in Council, of which I had seen nothing to change my original opinion. There was reason to apprehend, however, that it might be worse than useless to press the suggestion upon my own authority merely, while I could say nothing of the French decrees; and, accordingly, I forbore to do so.

An idea has evidently gone forth, since the Osage arrived, founded upon rumors of a doubtful description, that our relations with France have grown to be extremely precarious, and that we are consequently about to come to an understanding of a very friendly kind with Great Britain. It is not improbable that the Government has, in some degree at least, adopted this idea.

I have the honor to enclose the copy of a notification, recently received from Mr. Canning, of the blockade of Copenhagen and of the other ports of the island of Zealand, which I have caused to be communicated in the usual manner to our Consuls and citizens.

There being no particular inducement for detaining the Osage, Lieutenant Lewis, who will be charged with my letters, will leave town the day after to-morrow; and the ship will sail as soon after he reaches Falmouth as possible.

[Referred to in Mr. Pinkney's despatch, May 8, 1808.] Mr. Canning to Mr. Pinkney.

FOREIGN OFFICE, May 4, 1808. The undersigned, His Majesty's principal Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, has received His Majesty's command to acquaint Mr. Pinkney, that His Majesty has judged it expedient to establish the most rigorous blockade of the port of Copenhagen, and all the other ports in the island of Zealand. Mr. Pinkney is therefore requested to apprize the American Consuls and merchants

residing in England, that the entrances of all the ports above mentioned are and must be considered as being in a state of blockade, and that from this time all the measures authorized by the law of nations, and the respective treaties between His Majesty and the different neutral Powers, will be adopted and executed with respect to all vessels attempting to violate the said blockade after this notice.

The undersigned requests Mr. Pinkney to accept the assurances of his high consideration. GEORGE CANNING.

Extract-Mr. Pinkney to the Secretary of State. LONDON, June 5, 1808.

I have the honor to acknowledge the receipt of your letter of the 4th of April, by Mr. Bethune, together with the printed and other copies of papers mentioned in it.

I am to have an interview with Mr. Canning in a few days, (which he will agree to consider extra official,) in the course of which I intend to press, by every argument in my power, the propriety of their abandoning immediately their Orders in Council, and of proposing in America (the only becoming course, as you very properly suggest,) reparation for the outrage on the Chesapeake. I shall for obvious reasons do this, informally, as my own act.

Your unanswerable reply to Mr. Erskine's letter of the 23d February has left nothing to be urged against the Orders in Council upon the score of right; and there may be room to hope that the effect, which that reply can hardly have failed to produce upon Ministers, as well by its tone as by its reasoning, will, if followed up, become, under actual circumstances, decisive. The discussion, which Mr. Rose's preliminary in the affair of the Chesapeake has undergone, gives encouragement to an expectation that this Government will not now be backward to relinquish it, and to renew their overture of satisfaction in a way more consistent with reason, and more likely to produce a just and honorable result.

You may be assured that I will not commit our Government by anything I shall do or say, and that, if I cannot make things better than they are, I will not make them worse.

My view of the course which our honor and our interests have required, and still require, is, as you know, in precise conformity with that of the President; but if it were otherwise, I should make his view, and not my own, the rule of my conduct.

Extract-Mr. Madison to Mr. Pinkney.

LONDON, June 29, 1808. I had a long interview this morning with Mr. Canning, which has given me hopes that the ob ject mentioned in your letter of the 30th of April, (a duplicate by the packet, for the St. Michael has not yet arrived.) may be accomplished, if I should authorize the expectation which the same letter suggests. Some days must elapse, however,

I was questioned on the affair of the Chesapeake. There seems to be a disposition here to consider the amende honorable as already made, and, in a great degree, at least, by Mr. Rose's mission; but I am strongly inclined to think that it will not be at all difficult to induce them to renew their overture in the same manner, on terms more conformable with the view which you very justly take of this interesting subject. I was told (it was not said officially) that the persons taken out of the Chesapeake would be readily restored. The punishment of the officer (otherwise than by his recall, which has been done) will, perhaps, form the greatest embarrassment; but I will endeavor to ascertain, informally, what will be done on that and every other part of the case. My sole object will be, of course, to lead them, as occasion offers, (as far as in my power.) to do what they ought, in the way most for our honor. I can the more properly do this now, as Mr. Canning has himself proposed the subject to me, as intimated

above.

Extract-Mr. Madison to Mr. Pinkney.

DEPARTMENT OF STATE, July 18, 1808. SIR: Your communications by Lieutenant Lewis were safely delivered on the evening of the 8th instant. As it had been calculated that the interval between the return of Mr. Rose, and the departure of Lieutenant Lewis, would give sufficient time to the British Government to decide on the course required by the posture in which the affair of the Chesapeake was left, its silence to you on that subject could not fail to excite the particular attention of the President: and the appearance is rendered the more unfavorable, by the like silence, as we learn from Mr. Erskine, of the despatches brought to him by the packet which left England, and arrived at New York, at nearly the same time with the Osage. I have intimated to Mr. Erskine the impressions made by this reserve, without, however, concealing our hope that the delay does not imply a final purpose of withholding reparation, and that the next communications from London will be of a different import. They must at least ascertain the real views of the British Government on this interesting subject.

There was certainly no just ground for Mr. Canning to expect any particular communications from you on the arrival of the Osage, unless they should have grown out of such accounts from France as would second our demands of justice from Great Britain, particularly the revocation of her Orders in Council; and in imparting to him what you did in that quarter, every proof

not receive fresh complaints against the Orders in Council, he ought to have recollected that you had sufficiently dwelt on their offensive features in the first instance; and that, as he had chosen to make the formal communication of them to this Government through another channel, it was through that channel rather than through you that answers to it would be most regularly given.

The communications and instructions forwarded by Mr. Purviance, who was a passenger in the St. Michael, will enable you to bring the British Government to a fair issue on the subject of its orders. If it has nothing more in view than it is willing to avow, it cannot refuse to concur in an arrangement rescinding on her part the Orders in Council, and on ours the embargo. If France should concur in a like arrangement, the state of things will be restored which is the alleged object of the orders. If France does not concur, the orders will be better enforced by the continuance of the embargo against her than they are by the British fleets and cruisers; and, in the mean time, all the benefits of our trade will be thrown into the lap of Great Britain. It will be difficult, therefore, to conceive any motive in Great Britain to reject the offer which you will have made, other than the hope of inducing, on the part of France, a perseverance in her irritating policy toward the United States, and on the part of the latter hostile resentments against it.

If the British Government should have elected the more wise and more worthy course of meeting the overture of the President in the spirit which dictated it, it is to be hoped that measures will have been taken in concert with you, and through its Minister here, for hastening as inuch as possible the renewal of the intercourse which the orders and the embargo have suspended; and thereby smoothing the way for other salutary adjustments.

It appears that the British Government, not satisfied with the general blockade by her orders of November 11, has superadded a particular blockade, or rather a diplomatic notification of an intended one, of Copenhagen, and the other ports in the island of Zealand; that is to say, a strict and legal blockade of the whole island. The island cannot be much less than two hundred miles in its outline, and is described as abounding in inlets. It is not probable, therefore, if it be possible, that a blockade, within the true definition, should be carried into effect. And as all defective blockades, whether so in the disproportion of force to the object, or in the mode of notification, will authorize fair claims of indemnification, it is the more necessary that guarded answers should be given in such cases as heretofore suggested.

Since the British order of evidently inviting our citizens to violate the laws of our country, by patronizing on the high seas their vessels destitute of registers and other necessary papers, and therefore necessarily smugglers if not pirates,

sion upon the minds of Mr. Canning and his colleagues. I thought, moreover, that if I should reserve the suggestion for a late stage of our discussions, it would be made to wear the appearance of a concession reluctantly extorted, rather than of, what it was, the spontaneous result of the characteristic frankness and honorable policy of our Government.

The intimation once made, a complete development of its natural consequences, if properly acted upon, followed of course; and, taking advantage of the latitude afforded by the informal nature of a mere conversation, I endeavored to make that development as strong an appeal as, consistently with truth and honor, I could (and there was no necessity to do more) to the justice and the prudence of this Government.

It was not possible, however, that Mr. Canning could require to be assisted by my explanations. It was plain, upon their own principles, that they could not equitably persevere in their Orders in Council, upon the foundation of an imputed acquiescence, on our part, in French invasions of our neutral rights, when it was become (if it was not always) apparent that this imputation was completely and in all respects an error; when it was manifest that these orders, by letting loose upon our rights a more destructive and offensive persecution than it was in the power of France to maintain, interposed between us and France, furnished answers to our remonstrances against her decrees and pretexts for those decrees, and stood in the way of that very resistance which Great Britain affected to inculcate, as a duty, at the moment when she was taking the most effectual measures to embarrass and confound it ; and when it was also manifest that a revocation of those orders would, if not attended or followed by a revocation of the decrees of France, place us at issue with that Power, and result in a precise opposition, by the United States, to such parts of the anti-commercial edicts as it became us to repel. In a prudential view, my explanations seemed still less to be required. Nothing could be more clear than that, if Great Britain revoked her orders, and entitled herself to a suspension of the embargo, her object, (if it were anything short of the establishment and practical support of an exclusive dominion over the seas) must, in some mode or other, be accomplished, whether France followed her example or not. In the first case, the avowed purpose of the British orders would be fulfilled, and commerce would resume its accustomed prosperity and expansion. In the last, the just resistance of the United States (more efficacious than that of the British orders) to French irregularities and aggressions, would be left to its fair operation, (and it was impossible to mistake the consequences,) while the commercial intercourse between the United States and Great Britain, being revived, would open the way for a return to good understanding and, in the end, for an adjustment of all their differences.

On the 29th of July I met Mr. Canning again, and was soon apprized that our discussions, if continued at all, must take a new form.

These, and many other reflections of a similar tendency, which I forbear to repeat, could not have escaped the penetration of Mr. Canning, if they had not been suggested to him in considerable detail. But whatever might be their influence upon his mind, he certainly did not pronounce any opinion; and what he said consisted principally of inquiries, with a view to a more accurate comprehension of my purpose. He asked if I thought of taking a more formal course than I was now pursuing; but immediately remarked that he presumed I did not, for that the course I had adopted was undoubtedly well suited to the occasion. I told him that I was so entirely persuaded that the freedom of conversation was so much better adapted to the nature of our subject, and so much more likely to conduct us to a beneficial result, than the constraint and formality of written communication, which usually grew into protracted discussion, and always produced embarrassment when there was anything of delicacy in the topics, that I had not intended to present any note.

This interview (in the progress of which other points were incidentally touched upon) did not authorize any very confident opinion that Mr. Canning approved of what had been suggested to him; and still less could it warrant any anticipation of the final opinion of his Government. But the manner in which my communication was received, and the readiness shown by Mr. Canning to proceed in the mode which was peculiarly favorable to my object, connected with the reasonableness of the object itself, induced me to think it rather probable that the issue would be satisfactory.

The interview of the 22d of July was far from producing anything of an unpromising complexion. I urged again much of what had been said at the last conference, and suggested such further considerations as had since occurred to me in support of my demand. Mr. Canning was still much more reserved than I had hoped to find him, after so much time had been taken for deliberation; but, from all that passed, I was more than ever inclined to believe that the orders would be relinquished. He seemed now to be extremely desirous of ascertaining whether I was authorized and disposed, with a view to a final arrangement, to present what I had suggested, as to the suspension of the embargo, in a more precise shape. I told him,, after some conversation upon this point, that, although I would prefer that course which was the least formal, yet, if everything should be first matured, I might be able to combine, with a written demand that their orders should be repealed, such an assurance as I had already mentioned, that the embargo would be suspended; but that I would consider of this with reference to the manner and terms. He then observed, that I would perhaps allow him a little time to reflect whether he would put me to the necessity of presenting such a paper; and, upon my assenting to this, he said that he would give me another appointment towards the end of the following week. As I was on the point of leav